The U.S.  government archives says that the following are the words of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Any law that gives rights on the grounds of religion is “an establishment of religion”.  So the clauses in the ACA (Obamacare) that give religious organizations the right to ignore rules that everyone else must obey is “an establishment of religion”.  In order  for the government to know which establishments qualify for a religious exemption, they must set up criteria for “an establishment of religion”.  Could the U.S. Constitution be any clearer that this is unconstitutional?

To allow any corporation an exemption from a rule that requires the declaration of a religious reason for that exemption is “an establishment of religion”.  If people who do not declare religion as a reason cannot get the exemption, then this is “an establishment of religion”.

How many of our current Supreme Court Justices could pass a first grade reading comprehension test if they cannot comprehend the first 10 words of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights?

I wonder if the Senate needs to ask all prospective judicial appointees what they think those 10 words mean before the Senate can give consent to a judicial appointment.

The Real News Network has the interview with Larry Wilkerson What’s Driving Putin & Obama’s Posturing on Ukraine?  

There is a very good statement on what we ought to do, but i have chosen to highlight the ending remarks for those people who don’t have the time to watch the video below.

WILKERSON: The United States’s role has been the same in Kiev, I think, that it is in Caracas and that it was before in Damascus, and that is essentially fomenting regime change, whether you’re doing it through the National Endowment for Democracy, its counterparts the IRI and the NDI, or with the CIA, who are all in tandem, which is what I think we’re doing. We have no one to blame but ourselves for what results when a great power sitting on the border of the country we’re trying to change the regime in suddenly objects. I mean, this is Hungary in 1956, when we egged, by propaganda and CIA covert actions, the Hungarians to rise up. And they rose up, and the Soviet tanks rolled in. Or it’s Prague in 1968. We’ve been through this before. It’s just Russia now and not the U.S.S.R., but some things simply don’t change. Great power and the influences and moves and the procedures that they go through in exercising that power simply don’t change over time. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s Putin or Catherine the Great or some future leader of Russia, or whether it’s Obama or Mitt Romney. Their hands should be tied in terms of taking this further and risking a really serious war.

With matters as serious as this, I wish that world leaders could dispense with the need to play political gamesmanship. What ever happened to the “no drama Obama” that I thought I voted for? Despite the constant calls for war from McCain and Graham, I had hoped Obama could resist forever. Unfortunately, having Clinton as Secretary of State didn’t bolster Obama’s resistance. John Kerry seemed more amenable to being reined in, but I start to wonder about him as well.

What do you suppose Obama and Putin talk about in their extended phone calls?  Could they possibly play these childish political games and do it with a straight face for an hour or so?

I wandered through The Daily Kos to this video on YouTube.

Here are the author’s comments about the video.

Actual people in Louisiana are benefiting from Obamacare. Vote however you like, but don’t let outsiders lie to you.

I wonder what we can say or do to stop Scott Brown from spreading the same lies in New Hampshire.

I have such great luck meddling in other people’s politics. Just ask the people of Charlton. (That was a self-deprecating joke in case anybody from Charlton misreads that last statement.)

Aljazeeera America has the story Florida amendment aims to restrict Stand Your Ground court records.

Had the provision been in effect two years ago, for example, the Tampa Bay Times would not have been able to conduct its award-winning investigation on how Stand Your Ground has been applied unevenly across the state.

“We relied heavily on these records to examine the key details behind each case and track how defense lawyers were using the law and how judges, prosecutors and police were interpreting it,” said Chris Davis, the Times’ investigations editor, in an email to The Stream.
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Florida State Attorney Angela Corey has come under fire from civil rights groups expressing concern over what they consider to be an uneven record in several high-profile cases. Under Corey’s tenure, George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, and Michael Dunn received a partial verdict which stopped short of convicting him for the killing of another unarmed black teenager, Jordan Davis. Meanwhile, Marissa Alexander, a 34-year-old African-American woman, was sentenced to twenty years after firing warning shots at her estranged husband.

I wonder if these laws could be held unconstitutional violation of the Interstate Commerce clause.  I would like to visit Florida in the winter, but I am afraid to go there because of these laws.

Naked Capitalism has the post Google, Apple, and Other Tech Titans’ Wage-Suppression Conspiracy Estimated to Cover One Million Workers by Yves Smith.  Here is a quote of a quote from the post.

What’s more important is the political predicament that low-paid fast food workers share with well-paid hi-tech workers: the loss of power over their lives and their futures to the growing mass of concentrated power in Silicon Valley, whose tentacles are so strong now and so great, that hundreds of thousands of workers around the globe—public relations and cable company employees in the British Isles, programmers and tech engineers in Russia and China (according to other documents which I’ll write about soon)—have their lives controlled and their wages and opportunities stolen from them without ever knowing about it, all the while being bombarded with cultural cant about the wisdom of the free market, about the efficiency of free knowledge, about the need to take personal responsibility and to blame no one but yourself for everything that happens in your life and your career.

I had seen the headline a number of times and had not followed the link to read the article.  After all, I had never worked for Google nor Apple.  However, what they did probably affected me and all the people I have ever worked with in the industry.  I knew that there were industry salary surveys that companies used to set salaries in ways that skirted the anti-trust laws.  It never occurred to me that companies were blatantly breaking these laws, and that the breakage was being carried out at the highest corporate management levels possible.

Reader MardyS provided this link to an excellent lecture George F.R. Ellis, On the Nature of Cosmology Today (2012 Copernicus Center Lecture). It fills in some more about the history of the universe (multiverse) than I had previously understood.  If I watch enough of these videos, I’ll understand all of what we know about the universe today by the time I am 170.

There is the following introduction on the YouTube site.

Cosmology is today a precision science with masses of high quality data every increasing our understanding of the physical universe, but paradoxically theoretical cosmology is simultaneously increasingly proposing theories based on ever more hypothetical physics, or concepts that are untestable even in principle (such as the multiverse). We are also seeing ever more dogmatic claims about how scientific cosmology can solve philosophical problems that have been with us for millenia. This talk comments in these trends, carefully distinguishing what is and what is not testable in scientific cosmology, and relating this solid scientific background to some of the recent philosophical claims made about how scientific cosmology relates to issues of meaning.

The fourth Copernicus Center Lecture – “On the Nature of Cosmology Today” – was delivered by Professor George Ellis, a famous cosmologist, mathematician, philosopher of science as well as researcher of the relationship between science and religion, currently Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The 2012 Copernicus Center Lecture was part of the 16th Kraków Methodological Conference – “The Causal Universe”, which was co-organized by the Copenicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

The history of how Mardy came to provide this link originates from my posting on Facebook of the previous post Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe | Moyers & Company.

Naked Capitalism has the article These Charts Show What is Wrong With American Capitalism by Yves Smith.

… the stock market for a very long time has not served mainly (or lately, much at all) as a vehicle for companies to raise funds to expand their business. Instead, it serves as a machine for manipulating stock prices.

As I read this article, I was thinking that these charts are a measure of the symptom, but what has changed in the world to make this happen now.  In other words, what is the cause?

I then followed a link in the article to a previous article Our New York Times Op Ed on the Corporate Savings Glut.  This doesn’t so much answer the question of what is the cause, but it does provide some possible actions to help fix the problem.

Rather than blindly marching to Austeria, we need to set fiscal policy to the task of incentivizing the reinvestment of corporate profits in business operations rather than games at the casino.

Possible measures to achieve these aims include:

1) an aggressive tax on retained earnings that are not reinvested with a 24 month period after they have been booked (this provision needs to be designed carefully to defeat efforts to circumvent it through artful accounting);

2) a financial asset turnover tax that raises the cost to management (and others) of speculating rather than reinvesting profits in productive capital investment;

3) a reinvigorated public or public/private investment program that helps speed up the shift to new energy technologies (as scaling up usually induces a drop in unit costs of production).

Ultimately, I think the cause has to do with automation and job outsourcing to lower wage countries.  This  has made it more attractive for companies to try to economize their way to greater profits rather than grow their businesses. This is now how companies compete with each other.  They race to out economize their competition. This is the same reinforcing cycle that causes and perpetuates depressions. As business shrinks its costs, it also shrinks its customer base. As customer demand falls, it makes less sense to invest in more production and makes more sense to cut costs further.

Since the result of all these companies reacting in the same way to a common set of circumstances is this self-reinforcing cycle, no single company behaving differently is enough to change the circumstances. Moreover, no single company is strong enough to fight the trend for long.

The only solution to change things quickly is for governments that have the resources and abilities to change the environment, to use those abilities to tilt the balance in a better direction. The resources that governments have to stay the course of making these changes without fear of running out of money is being sovereign in their own currencies and only borrowing in their own currencies. Not every country has this ability, but the US, Japan, China, Russia, the UK, and perhaps the EU can definitely do this

Picture a balance scale with two large and nearly equal weights on opposite sides. The amount of effort that the governments need to put in is on the order of magnitude of the size of the imbalance, not the size of either of the two weights. The longer we wait, the more likely that the imbalance starts to grow in size to match one of the two weights.  This applies to the three items mentioned in the excerpt above.

Do you actually pay for a subscription to The Boston Globe, as I do?  When you read the Doonesbury Comic strip in your newspaper, do you think you are getting the whole comic strip.  Compare this image to what you saw in the newspaper today.

If you cannot trust them to publish the whole comic strip, how can you trust them to print all the news?

If you pay them good money, how can you trust them to give you all that you paid for?

I sent a letter to the editor complaining about this. If I get any response, I will add it to the bottom of this post. Maybe they will have an explanation of how they are going to regain my trust.

The television series Cosmos, A Space Time Odyssey on the National Geographic Channel, is on at 10PM Eastern on Monday nights.  It is also rerun at other times and days.

The National Geographic Channel schedule is available on the web.

This series in produced in conjunction with another television network that I will not name and which I will not watch.  I am sorry that I did not look up this alternative place to view the show until now.  If it as morally repugnant to watch this on the other channel, I hope you will find this alternative acceptable.  It is going to be hard for me to do, but I think I will try to watch the show on NatGeo.

I’ll make up some excuse to ease my mind about the morality of watching such a show that might in the slightest way benefit that other channel.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Science, Religion and the Universe | Moyers & Company is the second part of a three part series hosted by Bill Moyers.

I have not seen part 1 yet, let alone part 3, but this segment stands on it own so remarkably well, that I wanted to post it right away.

It should be no surprise to anyone who has watched or listened to Neil DeGrasse Tyson that he explains so eloquently why belief in a supreme being does not have to be part of a person who knows enough science.

Of course he says it much more eloquently than I ever could.  However, to put the feeling in my own words, I might say I  can understand why someone might want to attribute the unknown to the mysterious workings of a supreme being.  On the other hand, I am quite willing to look at a mystery of science, and accept the fact that we don’t know the answer yet.  I do not need to make up an answer that is outside of the realm of science for my own peace of mind.

Tyson has at the tips of his fingers, numerous examples of mysteries of science of the past that even the most brilliant scientists of those days were willing to attribute to a supreme being.  However, all of the examples he mentioned have been explained by science since then.  So, it is not impossible that there is some mystery that actually is the hand of a supreme being, but history has shown that the chances of any current day mystery being that hand of a supreme being is extremely low.

Mathematicians have proven that there are some things that are true in any self-consistent mathematical system that cannot be proved to be true using that system.  Not things we haven’t proved yet, but things that they can prove cannot be proved.  Keeping this in mind, it would not surprise me if there were mysteries of science that we will never figure out.

I have little doubt that most of the mysteries we know about now will be solved in the thousands or millions of years of intelligent life that will follow my own lifespan.  That means that I also know for sure that some of those mysteries will not be solved in my lifespan.  I can live with that idea.  If you cannot live with that idea, then feel free to make up any explanation you want that will give you peace of mind, if that is what you would prefer.  As Tyson says, just don’t insist that your idea be taught in our public schools as science.